Prime Minister documentary-maker Michelle Walshe’s day of reckoning

Sunday, 14 June 2026

After two Emmy wins, Sundance success and decades of achievement, film-maker and founder Michelle Walshe is learning that constantly delivering for everyone else can leave you running on empty, writes Angela Barnett.

It’s an impossible choice. Film-maker and founder Michelle Walshe had to choose between attending the 47th Emmy Awards in New York for her film, Prime Minister, on May 28 or speaking in Budapest at a UEFA Champions League finals event about her sports tech company for kids, CoachMate. Budapest was an incredible opportunity to showcase CoachMate to 200 potential partners, but in the end, she chose New York.

“I don’t know that I’m going to get to another Emmys,” she tells me, sitting in her industrial-style Auckland office. “And it’s a nice way to close the loop on the film and acknowledge the crew, Leon, and the effort they put in.”

The 49-year-old has recently been speaking to women about leadership and says that when her bio’s read out – award-winning co-director of Prime Minister following Jacinda Ardern’s leadership, Chasing Great about Richie McCaw (the highest-grossing documentary in Aotearoa), co-founder and CEO of Augusto and CoachMate, mother of four – she’s glad she’s there to “tell them that’s not the whole story”.

The story she wants aspiring leaders, creatives and film-makers to know is that striving for big things is worthwhile, it shows you what you’re capable of, but sustaining yourself along the way matters just as much. “It’s not selfish to look after yourself.”

Australian-born Walshe landed her first directing role at 25 as the ‘tips director’ on Changing Rooms. Before her first day on set, she hadn’t slept – her first baby was 1 – so she channelled what she thought a director should do. “My only image was Steven Spielberg and I thought I had to be loud so bellowed ‘take your places, we’re doing a wide shot!’. The crew looked sideways and pretty much ignored me. Turns out you can just talk normally. That was my first experience trying to be something I wasn’t.”

In 2008, when Walshe was 31 and had three kids under 5, she and husband Leon Kirkbeck, started Augusto in their 89m² Te Atatū home. “We had the edit suite in our house, and Leon would often sleep on the floor with the lights on so he’d stay uncomfortable enough not to sleep for long. We didn’t know how to do business another way.”

The couple grew Augusto to 50 staff and earned a reputation as trusted storytellers, working with the All Blacks for years, then releasing Chasing Great in 2016 and filming Ardern’s Labour Party campaign the following year. In 2018, they moved their family to New York to set up the American arm of the business with Walshe as CEO. Then everything changed overnight. “Covid hit and we had to move a company and four kids home in 72 hours to keep 50 jobs alive. We had to dig deep. We were back to sleepless nights.”

She talks about the performance she put on for the last 25 years in leadership positions, never showing emotion or vulnerability. “That’s what I thought showing up as a CEO looked like.”

Yet also knowing emotion and vulnerability are important drivers of stories. Instead of being the kind of director she thought people expected, she tapped into her own skills, including being a good listener.

“With Richie’s story, I showed up with deep curiosity. I’d say ‘yes, but what did it feel like?’ In Chasing Great we see a mighty All Black face defeat; a lasting insight from the film is “success is a lousy teacher”.

When filming Ardern, Walshe saw an opportunity to show leadership that challenged traditional ideas of power. “For me, Jacinda’s film represented a chance to capture leadership in a way we hadn’t seen before. She unapologetically led exactly as she was, with a baby. It was so foreign to me. I remember thinking I shouldn’t talk about my kids at work, and yet Jacinda said, ‘This is what my leadership looks like’. She breastfed at her desk in meetings and I found that absolutely refreshing. She had a lot of support, but it wasn’t easy and she let us see that. For me, it didn’t matter whether you liked her politics or not. What mattered was to see a leader at that kind of proximity show us a different way.”

As part of the funding deal with Prime Minister, they partnered with a US team including co-director Lindsay Utz. There were some cultural differences to work through. When Walshe wanted to leave viewers with hope she encountered, “Obama owns hope”. “We didn’t want to tie it up in a bow, but I was adamant the film had to feel hopeful. I’m thrilled with where we got to.” Neither co-director wanted to tell the audience how to feel. “Leading New Zealand through that time was incredibly complex. We wanted people to come to their own conclusions.”

During the making of Prime Minister, whilst keeping the lights on post-Covid at Augusto, Walshe also started her tech company, CoachMate, alongside co-founder Leigh Kenyon.

“CoachMate’s an incredible opportunity to impact kids and communities at scale, but a brand new field I’d never worked in. The company was building but so was the pressure. I started to hear a little whistle. I just put the lid on tighter.”

Then, last January, Prime Minister won at Sundance Film Festival. Walshe had dreamed of this moment: one of her films winning, and even better getting The Audience Award. But something didn’t feel right.

When she and Kirkbeck returned, their four kids presented them with a handmade gold trophy that said ‘The OG Audience Award’. “It was incredibly humbling – they’re arguably our most important audience – but it didn’t feel how I knew it should. Something was wrong, and I’m nervous saying the word ‘empty’ because it sounds ungrateful, but I felt numb.”

A few weeks later on Walshe’s 48th birthday, her eldest daughter, Halina, read from a card what her mum meant to her. Something cracked wide open. Walshe went from feeling numb to an avalanche of feelings that refused to stay put under the lid.

“All my conversations were raw and there was no ability to perform over the top. I told Leon ‘I don’t know what this is’.”

Holding it together at work became near impossible. “I’d be in a meeting and feel this swell of emotion and have to leave the room. It wasn’t a burnout, but a reckoning.”

Listening and empathy was something the film-maker had in bucket loads for others, but not herself. Things had to change. She went to her first women’s retreat. “They knew nothing about me or my work, they were just meeting a woman who felt lost.”

It’s easy to draw parallels with Ardern, who said after two tumultuous terms she had ‘nothing left in the tank’, but Walshe says that message wasn’t obvious to her at the time.

What was obvious was that continually performing at such a high level as a film-maker, tech founder and CEO was not sustainable without listening to herself. “It’s a beautiful thing to push yourself, to see what you’re capable of, but outward success can’t be the only thing. When you’re constantly delivering to everyone else’s expectations, you’re extracting from yourself. The reason I felt empty was that I didn’t feed anything back. I missed asking myself if I was OK.”

Walshe says we’re taught how to succeed, but not how to be kind to ourselves while we do it. Now, when she talks to leaders, she says: “When you hear the whistle, relieve some steam. But it can’t be another place where you have to perform or feel critiqued – and that includes yoga classes where you have to wear the right leggings.”

She says she’s now grateful for the reckoning. “I had to stop and do some work on myself.” Kirkbeck’s been her biggest champion. For her birthday this year, he arranged for them to spend time filming wild Kaimanawa horses. “Horses became an important sanctuary for me because they require no performance – zero expectation, you can have mud on your face and they’ll only react to your true self.”

Her family’s also been filling her up. They went on a Wellington ‘roady’ recently and got matching compass tattoos.

Towards the end of our interview, Halina comes in and shares reflections of the last year, then tells her mum, “You don’t see a glimmer of what everyone else does”.

On May 28, the night of the calendar clash for Walshe, Prime Minister won two Emmys (Outstanding Politics and Government Documentary and Best Documentary), the first New Zealand film to do so. It secured global distribution through HBO, CNN and Netflix and Ardern said on social media that the film “feels like the most accurate portrayal of what it’s like to lead with your heart on your sleeve”. She also thanked the team, including Walshe.

I spoke to Walshe in Manhattan, where she and Kirkbeck had sat in the same spot in Central Park more than 25 years ago, Walshe fresh out of documentary school and they were too broke for the subway. She says New York was exactly where she needed to be and she’s learning to honour the wins.

“It was extraordinary celebrating up there with Leon and the team. I finally let myself feel it.” Walshe reflects: “It’s been a long hard road, but worth it.”

Next, she was flying to Switzerland to meet CoachMate co-founder, Kenyon, and swap out her film-maker hat for tech founder, but decided to take a six-hour train across Swiss countryside rather than hop from plane to plane. She’s listening, taking time to pause. She won’t forget again, she says.

That’s why she got her compass tattoo on her solar plexus. “To always find my way home.”